This article will help you comprehensively understand how to run a Technical SEO audit and implement tactics that will help in optimizing your website.
Well, if you think SEO Audits are of little or no help in improving your website ranking, you might be inappropriately performing audits. Don’t worry! We will clear out all your doubts and give you deep insight into how to appropriately perform in-depth technical SEO audits.
Let’s get started.
First of all, it is quite important to understand when is the right time to perform an audit. Along with a preliminary audit, a website usually requires a quarterly audit. Also, you can’t estimate the duration required to perform an audit. It entirely depends upon the size of the website you are performing an audit on.
Let us sort out the type of audits into three different portions:
- Technical Audit
- Content-Based Audit
- Link Auditing
Coming to the next step, let’s discuss what would we need before performing a Technical SEO Audit.
- Website Access
- Social Media Access
- Google Analytics Access
- Webmaster Tool
- Google Search Console
- DeepCrawl
- Screaming Frog
- CopyScape
- Core Web Vitals
Steps for Technical SEO Audit
Run a DeepCrawl
This tool crawls all across your website and tells about the following reports:
Duplicate Content- DeepCrawl will give a duplicate content report and recommend you make changes to the copied content published on your site.
Pagination- DeepCrawl gives insight into how well your content is divided and how well it is displayed on other pages.
Max redirections- Google allows a maximum of 5 redirections, else it stops following. And much more. It might take a day or two to get the results and take action likewise
Review Screaming Frog
This tool focuses on specific areas such as Schema, Google Tag Manager, and so on. Let’s find out in detail.
Schema: To let Google understand what your website page is about, it is essential to check schema markup on the site.
Google Tag Manager: It is used to find out the missing Tag Manager Snippet. You can perform the above action by opening Custom Tab from the Configuration tab in the navigation bar.
Indexing: Check out the number of pages that have been indexed by Google.
Google Analytics Code: It helps you find what pages are missing Analytics Code on Google. To spot the missing ones, go to the configuration section in the navigation bar, and then click on Custom. Next, add analytics\.js to Filter 1, then change the drop-down to Does not Contain.
Robot.txt: It tells web robots which pages to crawl and which not. For example, there is no need to let search engines crawl cart, login, logout, register sections, etc. When you are running an audit you can look if any important page is being blocked or disallowed.
Internal & External Links: While running an audit, ensure your site doesn’t get a 404 error. You can use Deepcrawl and Screaming Frog to find such broken internal and external links.
URLs: It is requisite to consider the appropriate URL format. Remember, it should be optimized and user-friendly.
Review Search Console
You can distinctively check your website’s indexing status as well as work upon your website optimization. Let us look into what Google Search Console offers.
Keywords: Finding cutting-edge keywords would be a left-hand job for you if you are an SEO specialist. While auditing, review whether the targeted keywords are optimized or not. Go to Search Analytics and check out traffic potential.
Backlinks: Well, your site needs to maintain the number of backlinks as per Google norms: Track it out and remove the unwanted backlinks.
Sitemap: It helps Google crawl your website pages. Ensure not to crawl non-indexable pages and parameter URLs.
Run Google Analytics
Running an audit also includes tracking and reporting website traffic to optimize marketing trends and strategies. You can review the following parameters:
Filter: Ensure your site is not receiving false traffic.
Indexing: After a page is discovered, Google tries to understand what the page is about. This process is called indexing. Google analyzes the content of the page, catalogs images and video files embedded on the page, and otherwise tries to understand the page. It also tries to review the amount of organic traffic it is fetching.
Tracking Code: The tracking code is used to tell Analytics which account and property to send data to. You can find Tracking Code in Google Analytics>Real-Time>Locations
At last, don’t forget to conduct a manual search. You can check:
- how many pages are being indexed by Google
- If the top pages are being cached by Google
- If the URL is short and specific
- The hosting software linked to your website is functioning properly.
- Content duplication(if any).
And much more.
Well, running an audit isn’t any scientific formula or a fixed recipe to cook. You can start auditing from any of the above steps and review as many parameters as you want. Get on your way to organic search supremacy. Contact our SEO expert team if you need any help for your marketing needs.
You may also want to read Tips for Social Media Marketing and Link Building Strategies for your business.